Affinity Konar - Mischling

“We see our families on holidays,” Twins’ Father told her in his patient way. “Or so Mengele says.”

Twins’ Father was twenty-nine years old and a veteran of the Czech army. He carried himself like a soldier still but had a weariness that was likely exacerbated by his charges. Impressed by his military pedigree and German fluency, Mengele had entrusted him with overseeing the boys’ barracks and processing the paperwork of all the incoming twins, paperwork that was later sent to the genetics department at Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

If it could be said that Mengele ever did a good thing, that good thing was appointing Twins’ Father to his post. The boys loved him; they clung to him as he taught them lessons — German and geography, mostly — and he kicked a rag ball around the soccer field with them in odd little fits of games. There were mothers of newborn multiples who were permitted to live in the Zoo in the interest of assisting the development of their babies, and they cooed over Twins’ Father, saying that he would make a fine head of the family someday, but the man winced at this praise, and just carried on in his gentle and resourceful way. We girls were quite jealous of the boys for this ally, having only Ox as our designated authority. We learned nothing of where we were from Ox. From other girls in the barracks, we learned that Mengele’s Zoo had once been near the Romany camp. But now, the Romanies were dead, as every last one had been exterminated on August 2, 1944; their eradication was seen as a necessity by camp authorities, who were appalled by the rampant disease and starvation among them. This was not a problem of proper rations — the adults were clearly withholding food from the children. Romanies would rather sing and dance all day than address their filth. All that could be done with such a people was to end them.

There were rumors that Mengele tried to intervene. Whether this was true, no one knew. We knew only that the Romanies were gassed, and we, the twins of Auschwitz, remained. Directly before our compound, there was an empty plot of land where the Germans collected the dead and the near-dead. This plot filled and emptied in terrible repetition. This was our immediate view.

We could also see birches in the woods beyond the thirteen-foot-high electric fences. And we could see women prisoners in the adjacent field; if the girls saw their mothers among them, they could throw their bread to them, hoping that they would not loft it back, as our rations were greater than anyone else’s in the camp. We could see the labs we were taken to on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays, the two-story buildings of brick, but the rest of our view was limited. If someone had cause to pluck us up and take us somewhere, then there was more we might learn of Auschwitz, but otherwise, we did not see the section of the camp called Canada, which featured a series of warehouses so overwhelmed with pillaged splendor that the prisoners named it after a country that represented wealth and luxury to them. Inside Canada’s structures, our former possessions loomed in stacks: our spectacles, our coats, our instruments, our suitcases, all of it, even down to our teeth, our hair, anything that could be considered necessary to the business of being human. We did not see the sauna where inmates were stripped, or the little white farmhouse whose rooms were passed off as showers. We did not see the luxuriant headquarters of the SS, where parties took place, parties where the women of the Puff were brought in to dance and sit upon Nazi laps. We did not see, and so we believed we already knew the worst. We couldn’t imagine the greatness of suffering, how artful and calculated it could be, how it could pluck off the members of a family, one after the other, or show an entire village the face of death in one fell swoop.

The day after our arrival, Twins’ Father remained efficient and stoic as he approached our paperwork, but there were times in which his uncertainties seemed to surface as he considered the import of every answer and the effect it might have on our lives. I watched his hand waver between one box and another before imposing a hesitant check mark.

“Now tell me,” he asked, “which of you came first?”

“This matters?” Stasha had never been fond of this question.

“To him, it all matters. My sister Magda and I, we don’t know who came first. But we say that I did, just to please him. So tell me, Pearl, who was first?”

“I was,” I admitted.

As Twins’ Father and I continued with the details, Stasha directed her questions to Dr. Miri, who was waiting to collect the finished paperwork and deliver it to the laboratory. Dr. Miri was a beautiful doctor — like a lily, people were fond of saying, a solemn and thoughtful kind of flower. She reminded us of Mama a little, with her dark hair and too-big eyes and crooked mouth, but she was more doll-like, and the expressions that crossed her face often struck me as very strange because they were so distant, so far away. They were not unlike the expressions one might have while underwater watching disturbances occur on the waves above.

Even more remarkable than Dr. Miri’s beauty was the fact that Mengele allowed it to remain untouched. Most of the beauties who entered Mengele’s view emerged from it much changed, as he could not bear admiring them. He put beauties on one of two paths — the Ibi path or the Orli path. If you were on the Orli path, you might be beautiful on the day of your arrival, but on the very next you’d be given a disguise; Mengele would puff up your belly and swell your legs to sausages, or he’d turn your skin to wax and set it to run with sores. If you were on the Ibi path, you could go to work in the Puff; you could lean from the window and flutter like a rare, colorful bird and listen to the madam negotiate your price with the men knocking at the door. Dr. Miri’s path, the path of a Jewish doctor respected by Mengele, was the rarest one of all.

Orli and Ibi were Dr. Miri’s sisters. She didn’t see them much. If a person wanted to make Miri cry, all he had to do was mention Ibi and Orli. Mengele did this from time to time, whenever he found her work in the laboratory unsatisfactory or wanted to compel her to do things she did not want to do. I would come to witness such exchanges frequently in the days ahead, but on that first day, there was only Dr. Miri, standing there, waiting for our file.

“When do we leave?” Stasha asked her. A pause hung in the air.

“There are plans for that,” Dr. Miri said finally, after exchanging a look with Twins’ Father, the kind of look that adults use when approaching delicate subjects that they’ve approached many times before and still have yet to resolve. “We’ve started the plans but we don’t know—”

She was saved from answering when a woman appeared in the doorway with her infants in her arms, two bundles swaddled in gray cloth, their faces tucked away from view.

Sometimes, when twins were still babies, their mothers were allowed to live in the Zoo alongside them to serve as nursemaids. Clotilde was one such mother. Everyone knew who Clotilde was because her husband had killed an SS man; he’d seized a pistol from the guard, issued a fatal shot, and led a flicker of an uprising. Three SS were felled before the end of this siege, and care was taken to ensure that the hanging of this rebel was witnessed by all. But instead of inspiring fear, his death bred a hero’s tale. Her children would always have that legacy, Clotilde was fond of claiming, but their father’s fame was apparently of little comfort to the babies. They whimpered and kicked their tiny feet against their dingy wrappings, as if to protest their patriarch’s violent end.

Stasha drew close to Clotilde and tried to inspect the bundles. I was afraid she would ask to hold the babies — she tended to think herself more capable than she really was — but thankfully, she remained interested only in her own questions.